Portrait photography is one of the most popular genres of photography, with good reason – Portraits tell stories of not just people but also of time, culture and experience and place. Good portrait photographers are able to capture the personality and emotion of people around them, along with earning money via fashion editorial photography, wedding photography, executive portraits, family photography sessions, and so on. Shooting portraits of people is a difficult thing, as you have to manage not only technical parameters involving the camera and lighting, but also the person’s posing and expression. In this this course by professional photographer, Teddy Mitchener, you will delve into the essential conceptual and technical tools that will enable you to develop your practice, whether for a hobby or for business.

In this master class, you will learn:
+ To shoot professional portraits
+ To make use of natural ambient lighting and/or use artificial light to get the best out of your portraits
+ To master outdoor backgrounds to get distraction free portraits
+ To take better portraits by moving subjects into the right backgrounds
+ To take better portraits by creating better angles of the body
+ To capture candid moments without interrupting the scene

By the end of this course you should be able to:
+ Understand light better and have an easier time seeing it, and even creating it when necessary
+ Know all about different effects of lights falling on a subjects based on the placement of light…loop, rembrandt, butterfly, etc. + Create wonderful flattering portraits
+ Learn how to check surroundings for distracting objects
+ Make your portraits pop and you feel better equipped to take on any challenges

Who Should Attend
Intermediate Photographers looking to break out of the norm and Professional Photographers in a creative rut.

Master classes duration: 5 classes

Pre-Master Class: Each participant has a task before the beginning of the master class – to execute a series of 10 portraiture shots (any portrait genre). A review of each student’s work will be done on Day 5 of the workshop.

Master Class Structure:
Day 1 How to set up 10 Essential Poses You don’t need to memorize hundreds of poses to create dynamic and engaging shots of your subjects. Instead, you can learn just 10 essential poses, and make slight modifications to them to create an endless range of looks and create dramatically different photos. In this class, you will understand what the camera sees and vary 10 simple poses with posture changes and camera angles.
Location: N2N Gallery

Day 2 One Light and High/Low Key Light Portrait Photography It’s amazing what you can create with just one studio strobe. Teddy shows how to get amazing and different lighting with the simplest of gear. Whether on-location, or in the studio, he’ll use one-light in a variety of different ways to create everything from soft and pretty looks, to hard edgy portraits.
Location: N2N Gallery

Day 3 Fashion & Glamour Portraits Our daily lives are saturated with fashion images, magazines and blogs. The amount of fashion and glamour editorial production and publishing seems to now almost equal that of daily newspapers! On this day, Teddy teaches students how to apply the concepts of fashion and glamour photography to create vibrantly artistic and commercial fashion images. Using simple props, an unusual location, lighting, and model posing & styling, Teddy shows how to give that unique edge to create truly striking images.
Location: In the city

Day 4 Candid & Street Portraits The beauty of street photography is that it allows the photographer to capture humanity in its various forms. It is art that tells the story of life, humanity, and cultures. With so many of us now living in urban environments, being able to create an image that resonates and tells the story of urban life is more valuable than ever. Teddy will teach how to capture people moving through everyday life in artistic ways. There’s often no set-up. But the photographer is inspired by the position the person is naturally taking, the light, the environment or any number of other factors.
Location: The Heritage Village

Day 5 Participant Sessions Teddy critiques the pre-class homework of each participant, and work produced in-studio and during the walkabouts. This session will enable each participant to learn to create their own style, follow their own path and be unique. The aim is to ensure each participant does not go out and recreate others work, but looks at portraiture photography objectively and use it as inspiration!
Location: N2N Gallery

Prerequisites for participation
+ Digital Camera (DSLR)
+ Any of these basic lenses: 18-55mm | 24-105mm | 70-200mm
+ Speedlights
+ Laptop (with Photoshop C.C. installed)
+ Portrait Photography Portfolio or Pre-Class Assignments

About Teddy Mitchener
Teddy Mitchener is the head photographer at House of Fotography, based in Nairobi Kenya. A Washington DC native, Teddy is a self-taught photographer, having picked up his first camera in 1992 under the tutelage of his father, Willie Brown.
A fully fledged professional photographer, Teddy earns his living in Kenya primarily as a Commercial and Corporate photography and is an accredited CANON professional photography trainer for the EMEA region.
For Teddy, photography is simply one of the many mediums he uses to express his creativity. A graduate of The Duke Ellington School of the Arts, Teddy credits the institution with broadening the limits of his creativity and instilling in him the love of other art forms such as plaster and stone sculpting, wood work, pencil drawing and painting. The merging of these mediums is what now informs Teddy’s personal projects and inspires his creative photography concepts. “I picked up photography initially as a means to an end, to capture imagery that I wanted to sculpt, draw or paint, then along the way I found that my love for photography was deepening. It was however not until I relocated to Nairobi in 2009 that I became a fully-fledged photographer.
Teddy has now made his foray into the world of art exhibitions, creating conceptual art photography pieces that speak to the social cultural dynamism that he is witnessing in Africa today. His first exhibition was held in Dubai in February 2019, and in Venice in March 2019, both with AKKA Project. He is also slated to 3 exhibitions in Nairobi and Arusha, for McKinsey & Co, Alliance Francaise and Arusha Heritage Cultural Centre, all in 2019. In 2020, Teddy is slated to have a solo exhibition with the Le Sud gallery in Zurich. Teddy’s desire to elevate his craft and that of fellow photographers within the region has seen him found and publish, in April 2015, a one-of-a-kind magazine called African Photo Magazine. This magazine seeks to showcase the ideological difference between photography produced in Africa and photography produced in the rest of the world, which has resulted in photography being produced that does not represent the authenticity of the African, the aspirations of the African, the hope of the African, the soul of the African, in all its beautiful black, brown and white shades. This magazine seeks to elevate the African photographer, the African voice and the African Image.